Opening ticket to launch a review and exploration of on-boarding processes for new users and users added to a site, prompted by report from Cheryl S. about troubles adding users to her course site. Boone's Simple Import Users (https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-import-users/) worked well for bulk adds on Blogs@Baruch, and had been updated to accommodate AD integration. Seems we may see more bulk adds on the Commons as class-based use expands.

Bulk onboarding is a great idea, but there are lots of gotchas. Users with more than one email address; non-CUNY email addresses; creating user accounts without access to profile data; etc. A lot of these sorts of problems are mitigated when you have a canonical source of userdata, like AD, but we don't have that luxury on the Commons.

Still, it's worth talking about. I think a helpful place to start would be with some user stories. Cheryl's use case - where she is starting from a CUNY First export? - might seed one such story. Another example would be a faculty committee looking to move their work to the Commons. With a couple fleshed out stories, we can start to identify use cases we want to cover the most, and the technical foundation that would serve them best.

Point taken, Boone. I would say that "on-boarding" could also involve a review of our invitation process (in other words, we don't necessarily need to create accounts for people -- something we have never been very willing to do for the Commons), but we should think about how easy it is to invite people to the Commons.

Cheryl was starting with a list of email addresses for the students in her class. Apparently, she went to the dashboard of her blog (she wasn't using a group) and tried the "Add User" tool from the dashboard to bring people in. But she didn't realize that many of the students didn't have Commons accounts, and so couldn't invite them. Marilyn says that she didn't even think of going to her avatar in the top nav bar and inviting people to the Commons from there.

So, in addition to automatic onboarding of accounts, we can think about how people can currently invite people to the Commons and how they also think, in error, that they can from spaces like blog dashboards. If we can find ways to simplify all of this for users, I think it would help with usability